MUSIC therapist Melanie Kwan gained a rare and moving insight into the enduring power of love when she sat with an elderly couple in a ward at Alexandra Hospital in February last year.
Mr Tham Kum Hong, 75, had lost his lower left leg to diabetes and is wheelchair-bound. His wife of 40 years, Madam Chan Siow Ying, lay weak and frail in a bed alongside, wasting away from breast cancer.
Guitar in hand, Ms Kwan - who uses music to help the ill cope with their conditions - was writing a song for the couple.
She asked them to share their feelings for each other and to use these emotions in the song's lyrics.
It was a task many people might find too difficult, one that required more revelation than they were comfortable with - but not this time.
Mr Tham wrote in Chinese:
'I love you for being kind
I love you for being uncomplicated
I love you for being loving
You are a rare wife.'
Madam Chan responded:
'I want you to be happy
I want you to be free
I want you to be healthy
I'm glad for our 40 happy years together.'
Tears rolled down Madam Chan's face as the couple sang the song with Ms Kwan several times.
Madam Chan died not long after. At her wake, Ms Kwan and a nurse from Alexandra Hospital serenaded her husband and the couple's only daughter with the composition.
One year on, Mr Tham still misses his wife.
'It can get very lonely. I think of her all the time,' he says.
Yet this was not an extravagantly dramatic love story. Indeed, it was quiet and uneventful but its muted nature is perhaps what makes their union so resonant; it is one lived out by thousands of couples here.
They were an odd pair by any yardstick. She was shy and quiet. He was, and still is, chatty and gregarious.
'I was a playboy, I had many girlfriends. See, I was quite handsome, right?' says the retired cabby, pointing to the photograph of a rakishly good-looking lad in an old album.
The fifth of eight children of a businessman and his homemaker wife, he spent much of his youth chasing girls and frequenting cabarets at Great World, New World and Gay World, amusement parks that were highly popular from the 1920s to the 1960s.
'In those days, $1 could buy you three coupons, and you can do the rhumba or the cha-cha with three different dance hostesses,' recalls Mr Tham, who was a policeman for eight years before becoming a finance officer in his early 30s.
When he was 35, his concerned mother told him he needed to settle down.
'She told me that if I didn't get myself a wife, no one would take care of me in my old age,' he recalls in a mixture of English and Cantonese.
His mum then showed him a picture of a comely young woman and asked if he would like to meet her.
'She looked quite pretty so I said yes,' he says with a grin.
And that was how he met his wife, who had to quit primary school to work in a factory when her father died. She was the eldest of five children and had to help support the family.
At a meeting chaperoned by both their mothers, Madam Chan, who was then 25, barely spoke but quietly returned Mr Tham's smile.
'When we got home, I told my mother she could go ahead and arrange my marriage,' he says.
He offered 20 wedding tables, two roast pigs, gold bangles and other jewellery for her hand.
One month later, they were married.
There was no courtship. 'I went to visit her a couple of times before the marriage. We just sat around and made small talk. Her mother was always around.'
But he was certain he had picked the right wife.
'You could tell she was a good girl and would make an obedient wife,' he says cheekily.
His instincts, he says, were spot on.
For 40 years, his wife was a quiet, undemanding companion.
'She minded her own business, took care of her family, and never poked into other people's affairs,' says Mr Tham in the neat living room of his three-room HDB flat in Stirling Road.
'She kept this place spick and span. Our daughter is like her, always cleaning.'
There were petty quarrels, of course.
'But we fought at the head rest, and made up at the foot of the bed,' he says, articulating a piquant Cantonese proverb to mean they never went to bed angry with each other.
Mr Tham describes Madam Chan as a stoic soul who stuck by him when their fortunes took a bad turn after he lost his finance officer job and had to turn to odd jobs before getting his taxi licence at age 40.
Her devotion was even greater when his lower left leg had to be amputated five or six years ago.
'I was hospitalised for two months. First, I lost one toe, then two before the doctor told me I had to have my left leg amputated from below the knee if I wanted to live. She went to the hospital every day,' he says.
Madam Chan in turn faced her own medical crisis in late 2007 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It came as a terrible shock to Mr Tham as well: 'She had always been very healthy. Maybe she knew and she kept it to herself. That's her, she always kept her tears and worries to herself. She was selfish that way.'
Radiotherapy could not keep the cancer at bay.
'She had blisters on her skin, she lost her hair but she still worried about me and told me not to visit her in hospital,' he recalls.
Mercifully, Madam Chan's suffering lasted just a couple of months.
She died peacefully one evening last March as her husband held her hand.
Asked if she had any last words for him, he shakes his head.
'Sum ji tou ming,' he says. The Cantonese phrase means 'the heart knows, and the gut understands'.
She has perhaps said it all in their song.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
